We're Constantly in Fear: The life of a part-time professor

Academia's dirty little secret.

Several weeks ago, I approached my friend Jenny (not her real name) for information on how to get hooked up with a teaching position at one of the local community colleges. Jenny currently works at five different schools — three community colleges, one private university, and one online university. My guess was that if anyone could point me in the right direction, it would be her.

I always figured I’d end up in academia. While in graduate school, I taught a semester of undergraduate creative writing, but then after a few years in elementary-school classrooms, I gave up on the idea of teaching. Still, I keep it in my back pocket as a go-to if I absolutely have to do it again.

I approached Jenny not because things have gotten dire, but that the scramble from one freelance writing job to another is beginning to take its toll. I figure why not take it easy for a while, supplement my income with a consistent, guaranteed paycheck and balance out the uncertainty of the freelance life. And, yes, after years of living hand-to-mouth, I have lofty dreams of tweed, sabbaticals, retirement plans, and picking up the check while drinking beer with graduate students.

But, halfway through our conversation, after we’ve covered whom to contact, what to do with my résumé, and which schools not to bother with, Jenny knocks my professorial fantasy on its ass.

“It’s really political,” she says. “There’s an atmosphere where we don’t feel safe to talk [publicly] because we’re afraid our opinions and our thoughts can work against us. We’re constantly in this fear that this could hurt me from getting classes assigned next semester or my comments could hurt me when I’m trying to apply for a position.”

Apparently, this is the point when I become way too interested and change my posture from that of friend to reporter, because she stops speaking briefly to request anonymity.

“You can share that I’m not coming across as a rebel or a troublemaker,” she says, “but this is just how I see things and how I’ve experienced things so far.”

She goes on to explain that it’s not just the department chairs or hiring committees she’s afraid of upsetting; it’s also her fellow faculty members. Adjunct (or part-time, or “contingent”) faculty, she says, can be separated into two basic groups: the brown-nosers/optimists and the cynics/activists. Most of them want the same thing, a tenured or full-time position. But those positions are hard to come by, and the two groups are often at odds.

“I also don’t want to seem like I’m against my fellow colleagues who are in the struggle with me,” she says, “just because I see the positive.”

“We didn’t get the job because there is no job.”

One thing that came up in my conversation with Jenny was a website started by some of her colleagues. The site is called AdjunctCrisis.com, and though at the time I began my research it was not yet live, when I Googled the term “adjunct crisis,” I got 4,700,000 hits. Most of those links connected to articles and references written in the past two years.

When AdjunctCrisis.com does go live, the first post is by John Rall, an instructor who writes about how he was barred from advising a student group at Mesa College.

Professor John Rall says he’s “trying to swallow the tough pill that I’ll probably be in my 70s still in a part-time position.”

“Through my dean I learned that the administration does not want adjunct faculty to be advisors because they do not want to have to compensate them for the time they serve the students,” he writes. “Adjunct instructors cannot have more than a 67% load, and adding time as an advisor is not permitted. I also learned through my dean that the school has had cases where an adjunct gained over 67% and it led to the full time hiring of that adjunct on technical contract grounds. The administration learned their lesson and closed the loophole that allowed adjunct faculty to gain full-time employment.... I offered to be an advisor as a volunteer, but the school is highly skeptical of such altruism and does not want to take a chance.”

A week after my first conversation with Jenny, Professor Rall shows me around the adjunct office in the Mesa College English Department. The office consists of five tight cubicles, officially shared by the department’s 85 adjunct faculty members, though not all of them use it, and the attached 36-square-foot “conference room,” where we settle in at a small circular table. The 73% of part-time faculty members in this department is just above the 70% average for community colleges, according to the American Federation of Teachers.

When Rall began teaching here in 2004, he envisioned himself no more than a couple of years away from an esteemed professorship with an office and parking spot. With three degrees under his belt (bachelors’ in philosophy and anthropology, and a master’s in comparative literature), and a combined 13 years of teaching at the high school and college levels, he considered himself a prime candidate for a tenured position.

“I got here thinking I was going to eventually move right into a full-time position after a couple of years,” he says. “Now I’m mostly just trying to swallow the tough pill that I’ll probably be in my 70s still in a part-time position with a poor retirement plan because I’m an adjunct,” he says.

Video:

Adjunct Professor John Rall

John Rall talks about the opportunities and challenges of being a non-tenured, "adjunct" professor of English in San Diego community college systems.

To clarify, “adjunct” officially means “part-time,” an appropriate definition, given that California’s education code currently caps adjunct course loads at 67 percent of full-time (per school). In my mind, however, the term “freelance” paints a more accurate picture, as many “part-time” professors, like Rall and Jenny, create full-time schedules across multiple campuses, often equaling more hours than tenured (or full-time) professors.

This semester, Rall is teaching five classes: three at Mesa, and two at Cuyamaca. Although less than what he was doing before, it’s still full-time work.

“On a week when I don’t have essays, I’m probably doing six-hour days, four to five days a week,” he says. “As soon as the essays come in, I’m probably doing nine-hour days and weekends. I’m adding probably about 20 hours a week during those weeks, and it comes every other week throughout the semester.”

Kenny the Facebooker hit the nail on the head. It's a question of the haves (full-time, tenured) wanting to keep what they've got (fat gov't salaries and pensions) at the expense of the have nots (adjuncts.) The aristocracy of academia (most of whom are state employees) want to keep the serf-like perpetual part-time professors down.

Remember when teaching was a calling, not a way to retire at 55 years old with a ridiculous pension funded by taxpayers who can't get the same types of pension in the private sector?

I think the whole college-for-everyone experiment has reached its natural death. It's degenerated into the situation described in this excellent story, into 300-student classes taught by graduate students, into college students who have no sense of the privilege of education, into MTV spring breaks, and a host of other problems. And what started this degeneration? Government involvement.

Joaquin de la Mesa--in my opinion there is a misunderstanding going on with how funding works at the community colleges. Funding decisions are made by the administration and Governing Boards. At my college the presidential salary is close to 80 times what a part-time faculty member makes. Part-time salaries have stayed the same for years and years while administrative salaries have grown tremendously. Part-timers are afraid to say anything and have to depend on full-time faculty to advocate for them. In the meantime full-time faculty ranks have been thinned to the bare bones in recent years due to all the early retirements that administration offered to bring the costs of overall salaries down the exception being their own of course. In the meantime full-time faculty are serving on multiple committees and doing tenure evaluations, being club advisors, coaches, etc. Education of the future employees and voters of our society is not where we need the Wal-Mart model of doing things.

I taught my first class as an adjunct in 1974. Taught several others between then and 1982. 1982 to 2004 I taught 3-4 classes a year as an adjunct. Since 2005, I've taught 1 class a year plus some online classes.

I like being an adjunct. I get to meet interesting people, think about things in some depth with some discipline that I might not otherwise. The extra money is nice, but not that big a percentage of my total income.

I cannot imagine being a "full time" part time adjunct in the sense of trying to do it for my primary income. Frankly, it seems a bit sad to me. Sort of like people who try to make a living as extras in Hollywood because they get to be "in the movie business".

In my view, adjuncts should be people who have regular jobs in the fields they teach. Also retirees who worked in the field. They can augment professors who have a lot of theoretical knowledge with practical knowledge from hands-on experience.

When I was in grad school, my Labor Relations professor was a full time labor lawyer. My Market Research professor was a full time account executive with a national ad agency. My Compensation Management worked for a consulting firm big in this area.

Similar in many undergrad courses as well.

I learned a lot more useful stuff from these people than the professional professors I had.

This is what adjuncts should be used for. This is the only thing adjuncts should be used for. If I were a dean, I would never, under any circumstances, hire someone for whom adjunct teaching was their primary source of income.

Truly obnoxious. Administrators take all the money and create all the problems. They treat teachers like dirt and get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for what? I've seen this program so many times it's like the reruns of "I Love Lucy."

Where to begin?
As long as part-timers are foolish enough to focus on what full-timers have, they will always
miss the real culprits.
Have you ever noticed that in articles on high paying careers, educational administrators
are right up there? And that their numbers far exceed anything possibly useful? And
that largely they get their positions by continuous brownnosing which becomes the rule
for everyone?
Full-timers have no career path outside of this construct. If you don't want to take part in this, you are considered a jerk.
Part-timers probably suppress salaries for full-timers, but I can't give you statistics.. But it is hard to compete with someone who will give away the milk away for free.
Part-timers normally start out with this idea of hang on and your worth will be recognized nonsense.
Reality is that you are more likely to tick off someone rather than impress them.
If you do a really good job with the students, some disgruntled individual will feel threatened. You are more likely to get hired from a distance.
Full-timers are hired after a national search. Part-timers are geographically convenient.
Neither side is necessarily better than the other.
Competition means much higher qualifications to teach less qualified students. Overuse
of student evaluations means everyone must pander to the lowest common denominator.
Full-timers are just as subject to lousy schedules if they are not in the in group.
No one cared about my family problems either, serious enough to result in the death of my
only sibling.
A special shout-out to San Diego county. The Midwest with palm trees. Little socialization
outside of one's church group. Religiosity alive and well. Meanness seven days a week
and mumbo jumbo on the Sabbath. Social Darwinism writ large.

And another to English teachers. Always at the forefront in unionization activities. Educated enough to sincerely understand discrimination. Haughty enough to look down
their noses at colleagues who chose fields that were marketable outside of academia.